DIY: Transform Your Baby Shower Cards into Nursery Art!

When I was thinking about DIY projects I wanted to make for our baby girl's nursery, I had an idea one day while driving to work and I'm excited to share with you the final result.

I love receiving cards and I always find myself keeping them in a box or drawer somewhere and never looking at them again.  I love the memories they represent and so I wanted to find a way to preserve the cards from the baby showers I had.  The solution was to create a special piece of art for our daughter's nursery made out of the cards from my showers.

I thought it would be a fun, colorful piece and I am really happy with how it turned out.  Here's how I made it:

First, I laid out all of the cards I received at my baby showers and removed the duplicate cards (there were quite a few with the exact same design).  Then, I arranged them into color families.

I used a piece of poster board to make a heart shape I liked. It took me about three tries to get the right shape and size. Once I had the tracer ready, I began to find my favorite part of each card and used the heart to trace a heart onto the area I wanted to cut out.  Then, I used sharp scissors to cut out a piece of the card.

Once I had all of the hearts cut out, I used the insert of the IKEA Ribba frame to arrange the hearts to see how many rows I could fit. 

Then, I cut out a piece of poster board that fit into the frame and arranged the hearts into the color order I liked best.

I then stacked the hearts in the order I wanted to have them and then I affixed the poster board to the matting of the IKEA Ribba frame and got out my glue stick.

 I arranged the hearts again and glued each one into place with a regular glue stick.

Here's the final piece!

I decided to use it in the nursery's bathroom because I needed a piece for above the towel rack and thought this one looked particularly pretty with the pink walls:

If you're looking for a special way to make your baby shower or wedding cards a keepsake, definitely try something like this out!  You could do any pattern---polka dots or stars would be really sweet too.

Thank you for reading and hope you're having a great weekend!

DIY Nursery Artwork: Pretty Balloons

I really wanted a few of the artwork pieces in our baby girl's nursery to be hand made and I'm currently on my third piece so thought I would share a quick tutorial. You can see my DIY gold polka-dot piece here.

This one was actually inspired by something I saw on Pinterest, but I went in another direction with mine:

My finished piece

The original inspiration piece on Pinterest

I had wanted to recreate the above piece at my baby shower, but I ended up with an idea I liked better (which I'll share with you soon!) and decided to just do a piece with plain balloons.  I went with a mint color palette.  The nursery colors so far are soft gray, white, mint green and little touches of gold.

Here's what you'll need to recreate this piece:

• Scissors
• Glue stick
• White poster board
• 3 sheets of scrapbooking paper (feel free to use any color or print combos you love---mine are from Michael's Arts & Crafts)
• Twine string, ribbon or yarn
• Pencil
• IKEA Ribba Frame (the large size)

Step one is to trace a balloon shape onto a piece of poster board and cut it out. I freehanded mine until I got the size and shape I wanted.  Then, I traced and cut out 10 balloons of the light mint and medium mint colors and five of the darker teal color.  I didn't end up using all of the balloons I cut out but it was nice to have extras.

Once you have all of your balloons cut out, you'll want to take your large piece of poster board (I got mine at a local Kroger but you can get them pretty much anywhere) and cut a piece out that fits behind the matting of the IKEA Ribba frame.  Then, from the backside, tape the poster board into place so you can get to work!

The most frustrating part of this project was placing the balloons and string.  First, I laid out the balloons and arranged them into a pattern I liked.  Then, I glued the balloons in place, one by one---you'll see in my final piece above that I layered some of them.

Finally, I cut random pieces of twine string that I got at Michael's Arts & Crafts and tried to affix the strings with glue underneath the balloons.  I couldn't find my glue gun---but if you have one, I would use hot glue to place the strings because it is hard to get them to stay put, especially since they have a natural curl to them. You could also use ribbon or yarn and make your life a lot easier---but I loved the look of the twine.

Once I had the strings in place (I used my iPhone as a weight to hold the bottoms of the strings down), I tied a twine bow around the strings.  Then, I spent some time getting the actual piece into the frame and making sure the strings laid nicely.  The glass of the frame kind of pushed them down and it all worked out. It's kind of trial and error with this one.

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out---now I just need to figure out where to hang it.  I'm kind of in a place right now where I'm realizing that I have way too much gold art for the nursery (not hung yet, thankfully). I need to eliminate some of those pieces and add in some more neutral pieces to balance things out. I LOVE gold prints, but it was just getting to be a little much.  The best part is that some of the gold prints I was going to use in the nursery were actually originally intended for other rooms in our home, so I'm going to hang them elsewhere.  Thank goodness we still have nearly six weeks left to add all of the finishing touches!

Good luck if you try this one and thank you for reading :)